Showbar Manchester vs. Mess Hall

27.3.08

In the previous post, we mentioned in passing, as if we didn’t care, a project by
Funky Projects
(Asier Pérez) called “

Showbar Manchester

“. If we understood Asier Pérez himself correctly during his talk at the workshop on design and communication of cultural projects “Identity plus Fun plus Innovation“, which we happened to attend a few months ago in Aulabierta, “Showbar Manchester” aims to be a kind of “three-dimensional trend magazine”, that is, a physical space for social interaction for the creative class that the local government wants to attract to the supposedly degraded
Northern Quarter
of Manchester, a temporary space in which users and advertising companies would mutually feed back into the production of cultural consumption trends, fashion, leisure, etc. The placement of advertising in the Showbar would, according to Asier Pérez, ensure a rapid injection of capital that would allow the launch of other longer-term cultural projects, including a permanent cultural and meeting space.

Without a doubt, anyone who today, after decades of meticulous unveiling of the relationships between culture and the economy, defends the possibility of an autonomous art is a hippy or a cynic, or both at the same time. Funky Projects’ artistic approach seeks to escape cynicism by shedding any pretense of autonomy and unreservedly embracing the role of culture in the current post-Fordist production system. Asier Pérez reinforces this position by reminding us of the thesis of professors Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter according to which counterculture has become a business and, in general, “
rebellion sells
“.

In fact, Funky Projects no longer defines itself as an artistic collective, but as an “ideation company”. We were talking a few weeks ago, regarding this text by Andrea Fraser, about the consequences for the artistic field of the fact that artists have ceased to be producers of objects and become providers of artistic services. Andrea Fraser demanded the need to open spaces and negotiation protocols with institutions that would allow artists to continue engaged in “controversial activities”. For Funky Projects this possibility does not exist, and its activity is subject to the needs and requirements of public institutions, closely intertwined with the interests of private enterprise.

The initial idea of this post was to relate (but not to contrast, the title is a joke) the Showbar Manchester of Funky Projects with another project with which it has many points in common, although from a radically opposite logic: we refer to the
Mess Hall
of Chicago. It is also a cultural and social space, an initiative of an artistic collective (
Temporary Services
-among others-) and whose economy is also governed by very clear guidelines predetermined by its organizers.

Ava Bromberg explains in this interview (which is worth reading in its entirety) some of the basic approaches of the Mess Hall and its operation. During the interview, Ava Bromberg reflects on a few issues that could be directly related to what we have been talking about, but, in global terms, we want to think that what essentially distinguishes the activity of the Mess Hall from the Showbar Manchester is the will to generate a space whose meaning can be transformed by the users themselves. In this sense, Ava Bromberg understands that public space is something produced and re-produced constantly through social interactions and that it is never given in advance. Cultural production, understood as the result of social interactions, can be, following Ava Bromberg’s reasoning, an instrument to answer the inherited “structures” (spatial, epistemological, institutional…) and open the spectrum of what we consider as ‘possible’. Something that seems remarkable to us about this positioning is that, like Asier Pérez’s, it makes the possibility of an autonomous art not only unthinkable, but not even desirable.

However, we must think that the structures through which cultural and social production is “put to work” at the service of certain private interests are increasingly less rigid, more elusive and invisible. The Showbar Manchester is actually a device that imitates, in a somewhat crude way, the mechanisms by which culture and “countercultural” lifestyles are used by public authorities in coalition with private enterprise to attract investment and human capital to cities. In his article on the process of regeneration and branding of the city of Amsterdam as a “Creative City”, “Back to the Future of the Creative City” (an article that is also not to be missed) Merijn Oudenampsen quotes Bart van Ratingen, a real estate developer, who says: “It’s about creating space! The thing not to do is to publicly announce you’re going to haul in artists; instead, give them the feeling they’ve thought of it themselves. If it arises organically, levels will rise organically”. Ugh! this is what we meant by ‘elusive’ and ‘invisible’ structures. Merijn Oudenampsen points out how real estate developers have come to the conclusion that in order to successfully produce the urban “hardware” it is necessary a “software” that makes it work and in that sense the cultural institutions and the more or less temporary artistic projects (however countercultural they may be) generate a “traffic” that allows the promoters to “fine-tune” the property.

Funky Projects’ project is based on the conviction that these processes of urban regeneration through culture, which we also know very well here in Barcelona, are beneficial, in the long term, for society as a whole, something that seems highly doubtful to us, although this would give for another post as endless as this one. However, what makes us think that the Mess Hall is exempt from participating involuntarily, trapped in the hidden dynamics pointed out by Merij Oudenampsen, in an urban regeneration process such as the one that the Showbar Manchester wants to explicitly catalyze? The truth is that, to begin with, the Mess Hall is a space that, for now, is located on the outskirts of Chicago (50 minutes by subway) far from the “regenerating” objectives of urban planners and developers (it is also true that American cities are organized in a different way than European cities and we should reflect on this fact) but, what is more important, and unlike the vast majority of cultural spaces “underground” or not that are installed in neighborhoods such as the Northern Quarter of Manchester or the Raval of Barcelona, the Mess Hall is a space open to the local community of the neighborhood and not only to the artistic and activist community. Following Merij Oudenampsen’s analogy at the end of his article, the Mess Hall is an “open source” space that offers its users the right to intervene in the network and in the circuits of communication, information and exchange that cross it, and expands the possibilities of imagining what a truly creative city would be like.